A mammoth mistake

 Columbian.

In my defense, there are sites in North America where both species are present. They interbred -- so much, some researchers argue they shouldn't be considered separate species at all.

And it isn't like I'm using the term in the scene. I'm not even calling that lone male a mammoth. She and the child are probably not getting names either, although I was tempted by some of the names given to mammoth specimens (the woolly mammoth is also over-represented in largely-intact specimens.)

I'm still on the fence whether the narrative will refer to ruppia, ditchgrass, or make up something like "lake-grass." As I said in the earlier entry, there's something off-putting about calling, say, a season "the time of the big snow" instead of a simple "winter."

Still "giant sloth" might yank the reader out of immersion just as badly.

These are problems that probably will only be for this excerpt. The later ones are mostly from times well documented enough so I can use proper names, and in any case are more established as being the product of an external modern-day story-teller.

(With the exception of Egtved, which hits the sweet spot of both being a complex culture and artifacts that are well documented, and enough holes in our understanding of who she was and what was going on to drive an entire Bell-Beaker migration through.)

I also read the full supplement to the 2021 paper and I'm a little more forgiving of it. Still, there's this sense that the authors want so very much to push past the opening of the gap between the Laurentide and Cordilleran ice sheet, as if that is necessary to fully break Clovis First.

I don't see it that way. We don't have a great reconstruction of when the path opened, and we have just enough bifaces from before we approach the typology of the Clovis Point that majority opinion in NA paleontology is that there were probably multiple waves and there were humans here before that specific culture could be identified as such.

But for the purposes of story, I can leave Bennet et al un-besmirched and accept as within plausibility the coastal route out of Beringia -- but contrast that with Solutrean. Which is a rank pile of garbage, sorry. The Solutrean Hypothesis opens up to NAGPRA and Kennewick Man, and ties back to the actual plot with MacDonald, who might actually be Mescalero. Or Acoma Pueblo, but they will probably be represented with my NAGPRA Coordinator character.

The timing is still funky. For all the attention to dates, getting at when the trench was cut, when the first c14 dating was done (there was a core sample sufficiently prior to 2019, at least) or even which horizon the White Sands Girl was (I'm squinting at their stupid diagram and best I can gather is it is TM-2. Which is close to the bottom, which begs the question -- how did they label the trackways before they'd dug down that far and had a total count? There's a reason Hisarlik is numbered from top down!

Well, there's a good four hours of "B-roll" video available via the National Park. Still, it moves faster and has more of a plot than Heroes, which is what I've been watching of late.